I don’t know if it’s something many people deal with or is it more unique to myself and others like me, but there’s this schema my brain goes through with ideas. When I do something, especially something related to either computers or more creative, manual tinkering,at first there’s the idea. If it’s a new thing, then it just waits for its time to be realised or forgotten, but if it’s an improvement, an optimization or just something that annoys me that needs changing, it has this weird, twisted way of getting there. Since it’s a change to something that exists and often works, it brings with itself the danger of breaking it, so naturally I debate with myself, often for months and years, if it’s worth the effort, time and money to do it. Then once I finally convince myself, often by presenting my idea to someone who has absolutely no idea nor interest in it, like my girlfriend, I pick a distant date and a set of circumstances that need to be fulfilled for me to do it. But once I make that decision, I start “preparing” and tinkering with the thing I’m suppose to improve and inevitably break it in the process, thus the best time to make those changes is not in x months once I get my yearly bonus and have a long weekend, but right now, because it’s broken.
With that lengthy introduction out of the way… my data backups suck. And I don’t mean documents I work on or the archive of all my past and current projects. Those are neatly 3-2-1-ed with a couple of extra copies here and there just to be sure. But there’s a large amount of less important things, like images of old OSes, binaries of programs you can’t find anymore and various other things. All in all that’s about 2 TBs of data. Not all that much, but not an insignificant amount either. And those so far were stored on a single NAS-grade disk I bought last year for my primary computer. For many years prior to that I stored those things on old HDDs in external docks or stuffed into an old computer. That evolved into my test Proxmox machine with 3x old 1TB drives running in a VMed Truenas raid. Not the ideal situation for them for many reasons. Not only were those 3 drives different (literally a Seagate, a WD and a Toshiba) and were passed through Proxmox directly and not through a controller which I don’t have, but they were at best 1.9TB combined. And on top of that, Proxmox test server stopped being useful for me since I have the new homelab setup where I can run whatever I need on a much faster and more efficient machine. So after weeks of contemplating I decided that it’s time to fix that backup issue. I wanted to eliminate Proxmox out of the system, install Truenas bare metal and acquire 2 more NAS-grade disks for the total of 3 which would still leave 1 more slot left if I ever need to expand or replace in an emergency. But I wanted to do it in a month or two, after certain work-related issues were solved. So naturally I figured I might as well just prepare that test machine and recover one of the SSDs I put there for VM storage. Once I did that and liberated those 1TB drives, I got the idea that I might as well move the data from that big NAS drive to them, since it will have to be wiped for RAID setup. So I did that and… as Murphy’s law predicts, that was the moment one of those drives decided to screw up its partition table. One nervous night of data recovery later I got most of the stuff back, ordered those 2 extra NAS drives and will put the stuff together next week.
Long story short, the next episode will be about me setting up Truenas and giggling about terabytes of disk space I have no idea what to do with.
